Why does HubSpot no longer track pages visited on a company level in the Prospects tools? That was one of the most valuable parts of the Sales platform, and without that tool I am less likely to recommend Sales to one of our clients. I will send them to Leadlander instead - as they are still offering this information.
HubSpot could easily work around the GDPR but it appears that they are more interested in internal ease then building a product that continues to fulfill the needs of customers. This is the second time in two years (technically the third, if you count the Events beta that never worked right) that HubSpot has stripped down the Prospects tool. Why is HubSpot so against smart prospecting? Are they trying to push sales back into the cold-calling dark ages for new customer prospecting?
Thank you both for your feedback and your patience as I followed up on this with the Product Team.
Decisions like this aren't easy, so I wanted to provide some additional context on what went into the change.
First, a quick summary: last week, the recent activities feature, which shows pages viewed by anonymous visitors in the Prospects tool, was removed. Prospects still shows aggregated analytics about companies, and you can still view the individual pages that your known contacts have viewed from the contact record.
A lot of factors go into a decision like this, but here are a few that were high on the list:
- User feedback. Over time, the feedback on this feature has been mixed at best. While that doesn't take away from the fact that some users find it useful, it gives you some context --- when it comes to prioritizing features, we look holistically across our users, and build the features that will add the most value to the largest set of our customers.
- Usage data. In addition to anecdotal feedback, usage was very low. Less than 6% of all prospects users viewed that section of the sidebar every month --- and, in full transparency, that represents 6% of the fraction of all HubSpot users who use Prospects at all. Again, that doesn't take away from the fact that some find it valuable, but it gives you some insight into the data we take into account when making a decision like this.
- Recent regulations. The GDPR was enforced in the EU starting last week. Under the GDPR, storing IP addresses requires consent. The removed feature didn't play nicely with that requirement.
When taking all these data points into account, it comes down to this: where can we allocate our resources, to best solve for our customers? The work required to enable the feature to support GDPR compliance as well as the ability collect IP addresses without consent would have been an outsized engineering effort compared the value for the entire customer base.
Quick Update: We found an amazing program called Leadfeeder that has built their entire software offering around this functionality. It also has a native integration with HubSpot to get the website visits into HubSpot from Leadfeeder. This tool is better than Prospects ever was. Unfortunately, it's not free/cheap depending on your budget - but provides immense value. You pay for the tool, but get unlimited accounts - so everyone in your organization can have access.
Best of all, the company if Finnish - so they're fully GDPR compliant and have documentation to prove it. They use Google Analytics to track visitors by company. You can pivot around pages - even down to the utm tracking. I can't back it up enough how amazing it is. And the HubSpot integration is flawless. Our sales team loves the tool so much that even if HubSpot brought Prospects back, we would still pay for Leadfeeder instead of basically using Prospects for free (we're never getting rid of Sales Pro).
For a Company with only one offering this is a non issue, but for a company with multiple services and products it is absolutely critical to know what pages are being viewed so you can focus on the customers interests. Personally I feel this is a must requirement.
Quick Update: We found an amazing program called Leadfeeder that has built their entire software offering around this functionality. It also has a native integration with HubSpot to get the website visits into HubSpot from Leadfeeder. This tool is better than Prospects ever was. Unfortunately, it's not free/cheap depending on your budget - but provides immense value. You pay for the tool, but get unlimited accounts - so everyone in your organization can have access.
Best of all, the company if Finnish - so they're fully GDPR compliant and have documentation to prove it. They use Google Analytics to track visitors by company. You can pivot around pages - even down to the utm tracking. I can't back it up enough how amazing it is. And the HubSpot integration is flawless. Our sales team loves the tool so much that even if HubSpot brought Prospects back, we would still pay for Leadfeeder instead of basically using Prospects for free (we're never getting rid of Sales Pro).
Before implmenting Hubspot, we used Leadlander, which shows prospects, page views and individual pages visited in a drop-down menu for about $299 per month (on a month-to-month basis). This feature was stressed as one of our must-haves and our Hubspot sales person gauranteed that all LeadLander functionaility AND MORE was included.
I got support on the line today (03/27/19) and was informed this was removed in 2018.
So, my rep either didn't know or just flat-out lied... either way, this is incredibly bad form.
We are seriously considering not renewing the contract with Hubspot in June and finding another solution. This is not what I want to happen, but Hubspot just aren't listening, and the only sanction we have is not to renew. I have written to Hubspot to tell them.
I understand perfectly what you are saying, since we are the first to protest this action, as you can see in the first post.
But as a DPO of some European companies, I understand that the GDPR regulation affect huspot in prospections, and any company that uses these tools with European contacts can be sanctioned.
However Hubspot if you register that activity internally, but without access to anyone, and when your company gets the acceptance in a form of that contact, all the pages you visited appear. It is a legal and acceptable form. But the law is like that and using other tools can lead to problems.
Just to be clear, here is a quote from the GDPR regulations:
"Arguably the biggest change to the regulatory landscape of data privacy comes with the extended jurisdiction of the GDPR, as it applies to all companies processing the personal data of data subjects residing in the Union, regardless of the company’s location."
GDPR is to all intents and purposes, to do with 'Personal' data, therefore there is no possible argument for removing the Prospects tool from Hubspot.
I hope Marketo and Act-On are updating their competitive assessments to show that they offer this functionality and HubSpot does not! What a differentiator they have now for sales teams... Stupid move, HubSpot.
Very disappointed to hear this - and I dont remember seeing any notifications from Hubspot about this. This Prospects tool was decent but needed some enhancements, but instead the capability has been pulled out.
Hubspot website visitor reports (now called Traffic activity) is just unusable - what we need is list of companies in a geography that visited our website, and when you select a company, we need to see activity list from the visitors belonging to the company.
Clicky.com does a better job of prospect reporting, and it costs just $120 per year. (but there's no HubSpot integration)
Thanks for reaching out to HubSpot Support and taking the time to provide this feedback on the recent prospects tool updates. This is a very valid concern and one that we have received from many customers. Our product team is aware of the demand for this feature to be returned but I will share that another customer has reached out. I'm sorry for how this update has impacted you!
To provide you with some more contact around this change, the prospects tool page activity data was being collected without direct consent from your website visitors, making this data not 100% GDPR compliant. For this reason, the decision to remove the prospects recent activities feature was executed for the time being. There is currently no plan in place to re-instate this feature but if this does occur, you should see it on our product updates page, here. The feature was not removed due to your specific GDPR compliance or other HubSpot customer portals, rather to ensure that HubSpot's analytics tracking and your data itself is compliant.
The reason this change was implemented across all prospects, not only EU based IPs is because the IP address is not a reliable identifier of a person’s actual location or citizenship e.g. if someone is using a VPN for example, it might not be their actual location. Also, if your audience is one that frequently flies for business, there is a chance that an EU citizen being in America and not seeing the privacy display as he/she should. There is no way for HubSpot to tell who's information we can share in the Prospects tool without their consent based on IP.
I know this is making a large impact on your use of HubSpot. If you would like to discuss this change further, I'd recommend reaching out to your account manager. If you need their contact details, please let me know.
I hope this helps to clarify, do let me know if you have any further questions on this at all, always happy to help.
Question regarding this comment: "To provide you with some more contact around this change, the prospects tool page activity data was being collected without direct consent from your website visitors, making this data not 100% GDPR compliant."
Can Hubspot cover themselves by adding in a certification that our business does not solicit any business from Europe and therefore are not subject to GDPR rules?
@Glenn1 I work for an insurance agency that can't write policies outside the USA, but they still won't let us be exempt from GDPR. It's everyone or no one with them.
The GDPR is applicable when working with data from people, I do not understand why it puts companies in the same place. An ip of a worker of a company IS NOT GDPR DATA.
